Meredith Thring has been a student of G.I.Gurdjieff's ideas since 1937 when he attended lectures given by P.D. Ouspensky in London.

" For fifty years I have carried an indelible memory of the times I was granted to be at Mr Gurdjieff's flat in Paris. He was in great pain after a car acciedent and yet his unbounded benevolence could be clearly felt and he was able to give real help to groups of people who had been studying his ideas.

To be in his presence gave me a glimpse of a World quite different from anything I had ever imagined. All my worries - and I am a great worrier - just vanished. I came back to London after these meetings full of wonder, having come in contact with a deeper Reality. The certainty of the existence of this Reality remains with me undiminished and this book is an attempt to repay my debt to him.

I have tried to put into index form all those words which have acquired deep meaning for me, from a study of his own writings and those of pupils:-

The first Appendix and the carving on the front cover are an attempt to represent diagrammatically Gurdjieff's Trogoautoegocratic Process by which the Universe is maintained. The other two are essays showing how Gurdjieff's ideas can remove the blinkers imposed on Science by Bacon and Descartes.